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SOLARWINDS LAB EPISODE #44:

HUGE NEW NPM 12 FEATURES AND THE NEW ORION® UI

NPM 12 with NetPath™ F5® load balancer service management, deep Cisco® stack switch monitoring, a new installer, and a new interface is a huge release for SolarWinds. Join the Head Geek™ team as they get you ready to upgrade. Head Geek Patrick Hubbard brings together the developers who wrote the new UI code, the visionary behind a new way to manage networks you don’t own (NetPath), experts for F5 discovery and management, and covers an easier way to manage your Cisco stacked switch gear.

Episode Transcript

And I'm Patrick Hubbard, and we have got a fantastic show for you today. That's right. We are finally going to take the wraps out of NPM 12, out in the open for real.

Is it hard to not spill the beans when you know exactly what's about to release?

You have no idea. And when you see what’s in the new version of NPM, you're going to understand why we have all these guests today. Rob is a principal Orion interface developer. Chris, I think you know, is a super technical product manager for NPM, and we're going to be completely in demos today. There's a lot to cover, so what are we going to show?

Awesome. Those last two, a lot of requests for, especially the F5, I think you guys will really like that. And then NetPath is the official name for what is...?

Lab toy.

Lab toy, you guys were showing that to people.

It's been promoted.

In secret.

Seems to be working.

For like a year, and really, really great feedback. You're going to really love it, and we've been showing it to our SWUG—SolarWinds User Group Meetings. Trying to keep all of this in about 15 minutes is really going to be a challenge.

Yeah, and Patrick, as you teased a little bit earlier, we focused a lot of changes to the user interface. So, what I am going to do is give you a walkthrough of what's been streamlined and what you can expect moving forward.

That's awesome. It's time for a little bit of an update.

Indeed.

Another big change is that we have updated the installer process, to make it a little bit smoother. So, we are going to have some special guests on to talk about some new features. Like pre checks?

Like pre checks. Okay kids, strap in, we have a ton to cover. Ask your questions in the chat box over here to the right of the screen. If you don't see the box, it means that we are not live. So swing by lab.solarwinds.com and register for the next show. Okay gentlemen, I think we've got a lot to cover. You guys ready?

Ready. [SOUND]

All right, so Rob, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

It is great to have you here. This is Rob Stovenour, principle developer on UX. Literally the guy who sits behind the keyboard and makes this happen.

I'm one guy. I'm part of a large UI development staff. [LAUGH]

All right, so what we want to do is we're going to show you a couple of features, and a couple of changes in the way that you drive the UI, a couple of things that make it a lot easier. I wanted Rob to be here to talk about it, to talk a little bit about how we kind of got to this point. So, first of all, the new login screen. I mean, I have used the old login screen building demos for a long time.

You're not the only one. [LAUGH]

This is much, much cleaner and I'm assuming there are fewer page masters and all the other stuff.

Yeah, a little fresher. Brought it up to the current decade. Made it a little bit less [LAUGH] something you'd want to hack. Well, okay, but to that point. It's not to say that the old UI was getting a little long in the tooth, but certainly it could have been a little bit fresher.

Could've been a little bit fresher.

So, that's the number one goal here, right?

Number one goal. Make it fresher and make our users not have to interact with the software just as much as they used to, right? Make it more streamlined, easier to navigate.

Okay, so what are we looking at here?

So right now you're looking at the NPM homepage, right? You guys are probably familiar with this page. But a couple of things we did here: one is we refreshed the fonts. Which is kind of subtle but it's easier on the eyes. Another thing is we increased contrast. So if you'll notice that there's a very gray background now with a white contrasting area for the widgets or the resources.

Took the frame away.

Took the frame away.

So there's just less lines here and the main thing I see here is, where did that giant menu go?

[LAUGHTER] Exactly. So, one of the major changes that everybody's going to be really interested in. The changes we did to the menu itself, right? So, what you're seeing here probably looks nothing like what you're used to. And what we did was, we took a shot at bringing all the things that we thought were important and moved them into this main menu area, right?

I know that when you have a lot of modules or a lot of customization, you'd be kind of scrolling across—

That's right.

Trying to stay on it. This makes that a lot easier. So basically, you took what was all the separate tabs and then rolled them up into this My Dashboard.

Exactly, so the old tab system, now it's moved into this one menu item. So that you have quick access to it. You don't have to work with the mouse to actually get things to activate and navigate through. It's just right there, easy to use, easy to get to.

What I like, too, is that you have a couple of options with these, right? If you only have a couple of modules, you're typically going to use this expanded view.

Right.

What we call expanded view.

It will be as long as the number of elements underneath here. And if you're used to doing menu customization, each one of these would have been the customized menu under that tab.

Right.

But, if you have a lot of modules, or giant menus, then this thing would start to get really long—

It doesn't scale. And we went back and forth on this, right, because there was a debate of which do we choose, and so the answer is, you can actually choose yourself.

Right.

So you click this button down here for collapse, and it's going to turn it around and then run what were the tabs on the left-hand side. And then you get this big breakout for all of the submenu elements underneath.

Exactly, exactly. It just makes things a little bit more condensed. We give you two option, because not everybody likes one single option. The feedback we got was almost 50/50 for wanting it condensed and wanting it to show everything it wants.

And it remembers it by user, so when you come back—

It remembers by user.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's great. The other thing, you remember we used to have that big orange bar here for notifications, right?

That's right, notifications.

So where did those go now?

Notifications: we didn't remove them, we just moved them. So if you notice the red badge at the top right, those are now your notifications. So anytime there's something that we want to communicate to you as the end-user, they still get propagated up to you. We just remove that big orange bar so that it doesn't get in the way of your work. Now, they're just tucked away for you to look at your leisure.

You have really critical issues. You haven't set your default email.

I know.

The thing that I just can't get past is, we have a little bit of a blue bar here across the top. Because obviously, this is an eval version with our beautiful sample map down here instead of what we normally use. But with the exception of this little bar, that normally would go away, right? That's sort of top level, "you need to know about this." And you guys have already seen the screen where it tells you what you need to do there.

That's right.

But when that goes away, you're only going to have, what, 30-something pixels—

40 pixels.

40 pixels. So, that'll collapse, and at the top of the menu, that's it. So getting to that menu is easy. You just going to bang up to the top the page and it's there. Well, the other thing you guys did that's cool is, you know before you'd scroll down to the bottom of the page and then you needed to change your net, right? Well, how do you do that now?

So now, you'll notice that as you're scrolling the menu, at the top stays there, the header. So, it no longer scrolls with the page. It stays at the top because we've been able to reduce it to just 40 pixels. It doesn't take a lot of space up, even though we're scrolling down. So you still get the focus on your content. But we then get the luxury of keeping that up at the top, so you can navigate without having to scroll all the way back up now.

Yeah, it's awesome. And there's some changes to settings menu, obviously we're going to show that in just a minute.

Refreshed a little bit.

When we get into our NetPath demo, but this is just so much cleaner and, just, please keep the feedback coming to the UX team. This is the direct result of all of that work. You guys are interacting with customers. Couple of, three times a day now, and it's interesting, because you guys are surprised and we'll see notes and times it's lax, it's like, I'm talking to the developers and I'm seeing changes in the data in almost real-time!

That's right. That's right. It's very important to us. We couldn't get them where we're at without the user feedback, so keep it coming.

Awesome! Well, thanks for coming.

You bet.

Okay, Michal, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're just going to take a couple of minutes. Miguel is the product manager for the upgrade and install process.

That's right, Patrick.

And we have gotten so much feedback from you guys in the past on some improvements that you wanted to see in that. That I wanted you guys to be able to see what that looks like in the Installer. We're going to look at a couple of different tools. And what really drove this?

Last year, we released, actually, a couple of products at once. And we got great feedback from you guys about how to do it better next time. So we actually implemented your feedback into the new install, and installation process, and made it much easier for you this time. Yeah, and you remember THWACKcamp last year. Joel was talking about investments in user experience, in UI, as we saw earlier. This is, we're beginning to see the fruit of those efforts. So, let's take a look at these. And the first one is going to be the new install wizard, right?

That's correct. We try to improve it so your environment doesn't need to stop every time there's a missing component, missing .NET version, and etc. So you can run through the entire upgrade process or a fresh installation without actually reaching out for support or THWACK.

Awesome. Well, let's take a look at that.

Sure. So, actually I have NPM here. Just double-click that, run the new installer. And right before you're actually going to install something, it tries to perform the check about their environment. It detects the versions you have, it detects direct for the right components, because we are always continuously adding and upgrading the components of the devices. And if there is something missing, it's going to tell you what's missing and what exactly you need to do to follow the installation.

So this is basically the standalone pre-flight tool that we've shown on the show before, and that some of them were already using, but it's incorporated into the Config Wizard, which means it's also going to run every time they do an upgrade?

That's correct.

That's awesome. All right, so what are our results here?

In this case, we see that we have one showstopper here, our message screening service. It's not installing or running. If I would like to continue, click here on the details and it tells me about how they knew that. I can click on the KB article here, which takes me to the more details. I know I need to go to Windows Service, enable it, or install it. And then, the pre-flight starts checking this thing again, and let me to continue to install NPM. Before, I would have no clue what's going on, and I would have typically reached out for support.

Well, and I also like it here, every now and then again, we'll have someone who will be confused about whether they're setting up the eval version or production, and right here, it says, hey, you're about to set up on SQL Server Express, which is fine if you're doing an evaluation. But for all of you guys that are in production, you don't want to do that. It will remind you on the connection that you're not set up. That's awesome. Okay, so let's say this doesn't do it. And you want to go back and actually figure out—maybe it's a more complex upgrade. Maybe you have a lot of modules, you have a number of pullers. And maybe you haven't upgraded in a while. Not that we're saying that any of you guys wouldn't do that, or that you're paying for maintenance and you're still on version 10.5, but it does happen. And normally you would go out to THWACK, and then figure out what the steps are for the upgrade. But you've got a new tool for that.

Yes, we also think of these users, and as you said, Patrick, typically, the majority of our user base is on the latest versions. However, there are still some, for whatever reason, where many products with obsolete versions. And we would like to give you a much better way you can upgrade to the new features and actually bring with NPM 12.

All right, let's see that.

So let's see how that works. And again, let's imagine I'm on old NPM 10.7 with a couple of products installed and I would like to upgrade to the latest.

Okay, so now it's running the compatibility checks.

Yeah, and as you see, we've made a quick check. And a contextual check of all your products to install. And you actually have all the versions to upgrade. So, we take you through the NPM as a first. That's always the base. And then, as you can read, there is a link with the download. So click from this window directly to the Download button.

So you get the bits right there.

You get the bits. You don't need to look in anywhere. And you start installing one by one, right to the end. That means for some folks' order, there is a product advisor on the web that you can use today, but this is much more convenient for you, because it's contextual of your environment. And you can just see what exactly you have installed and don't need to select the versions.

Well, first of all, if you're still running SAM 5.0, naughty, naughty. But what I really like about this too is that you might not, I mean, some of these upgrades might take a little while, right, especially if they have to be performed in sequence and you're this far out of date. But because if you come back here, it's going to pick up where you left off.

Of course.

Right? So you just basically keep whittling it down from the top to the bottom, and when you get to the end, you're done.

That's it, Patrick.

Miguel, this is fantastic. You guys have done some really, really great work here. And please, go upgrade this. You are going to love NPM 12. [SOUND] So Chris, NetPath.

NetPath.

What is NetPath, in 15 seconds?

NetPath shows you the end-to-end network path that your traffic traverses to deliver an application to a user. That works for your network or your provider.

And why do I care about that? What makes this different?

Well you have all these services, right, going into the cloud. Outlook 365, Salesforce, and so on.

But you don't have visibility into their network with NPM. Now you do.

So, regardless of whose it is, you can still manage it the same way. Okay, this is, I think, the single coolest feature of this release. We're going to spend some time on it but, not to tease, but I'm going to push that off for just a couple of seconds. We're going to spend two minutes on two other features that we've got to cover. And that is stack switches and F5 load balancers.

Yes.

All right, so let's do those right quick. We're going to do these, we'll come right back to this, and we'll finish up the show talking about NetPath. Okay, so when you upgrade and you click on a switch that is part of the stack, you are going to notice over here in the sub view there's a menu that there's a new switch stack link. I click on that link, and it's going to take me into all the stack switch details that I would expect to see for that. Or actually, maybe I wouldn't expect to see, because we haven't done this before. So you can see the switches that are a part of it. I can see over here, the stack data ring connectivity. How many times do you have one where maybe there's a failure of one of the cables? And as long as everything is running okay, that's fine. You don't know that you're imperiled for a moment of awful, failed—

Everything good. No, it would be nice to get an alert that your ring is not functioning.

Right, because you've lost redundancy. So what happens upon the next failure, stack partition? So when these two things try and became the same switch at the same time, not a good thing.

Yeah, forced master election is just not any good, right?

Right.

You can actually see which one is the master, because there's an icon that'll actually tell you which one.

Yes.

And will alert when that changes, as well.

Optionally, yes.

Very, very good.

There's out of the box alert for that.

Other rings that are kind of important here would be, obviously, the power ring.

Right, so the stack data ring is your back playing, transferring all of your packets, and your power ring is sharing the power between the power supplies and the various units. So that they all have redundant power.

Awesome, and so how much does this cost?

This is free. This comes with NPM.

That's right, and what extra polling do you have to setup for this?

None.

So after you upgrade—

It'll just be there.

It'll just be there for all of your—

That's right, this all comes via SNMP so it'll just populate.

Awesome, okay, so that was a minute and a half on that, I think.

So next? F5 load balancers. Okay, so the first thing you'll notice under Network is a load balancing view that will take you right here to this page. It's going to give you sort of an overall view. This looks an awful lot like AppStack, of all the different components that are part of your F5 Load Balance environment.

That is absolutely true. So, when we look at this, we would expect to be able to drill into details. Which, of course, we can. And I can start in a number of different ways, but in this case, let's go ahead and start with this service right here. And I'm going to say, show relations. So, again here, it's apology. Not just what the statuses are of these individual servers. But how are they interrelated, and what the service delivery path looks like.

Right, relations are super important, particularly in load balancing. Where you have all of these physical entities, and logical entities, and they all must mesh together to form a service.

And I can see my GTM and LTM traffic details here, as well as the pool members and I can slice and dice this any way I want.

That's right.

So, if I drill on a particular surface and look at its details, again, it's going to give me a context of where I am in that view and then here. Once upon a time, you and I had a lot of discussions about what is the correct way to measure the total application load on a service? And I think we both got to, and I think it was your suggestion, that we actually do it based on the number of concurrent connections by virtual service.

Concurrent connections, yes.

Regardless of the load-balanced infrastructure in the pool behind it. And so, I am just not at all surprised that this is one of the first charts that you wanted to do for that.

Yeah.

But yeah, just really handy. Again, polling here for this, some magic new changes?

Most of it's SMP, believe it or not. So we do the status polling at two minutes by default, so you can know right away if a server goes down within your load balancing. And then for the statistics, it's every ten minutes by default, but that's configurable. That gets you almost all of the data. The two things: we did implement F5 iControl API access. What that gets you is visibility into your health monitors. So the name of the health monitors, status, as well as the status reasons. So it will tell you, this thing is down and here's why the F5 believes it is down. And then also being able to add and remove servers from the load balancing rotation.

Wait, wait, wait, you're saying that just like with VMAN, where I can go and actually execute V-Motion and make changes in my virtual environment, I can actually make changes here in my production environment for my load balancers right to the GUI?

If you have privileges and you accept a couple of those annoying warning boxes, yes.

I have privileges.

Okay.

I'll make that happen.

Well, let's do it right now. No, let's not do it right now. But you know what we ought to talk about right now? And thanks for indulging us while we talked about these two features because we've had a lot of requests for these over the years, and certainly for SolarWinds Lab, you guys have had a lot of comments on them. So let us know if you want us to dive into these, into more details, especially switch stacks and configuration, and a couple of elements there. Okay, enough about that. NetPath, the star of the show.

That's right. This is NetPath. So, just to get orientated to what we are looking at here, we have an Austin lab probe, so a probe we place in our lab to Salesforce. Salesforce, an important service for us here, out on the internet. And if we orient ourselves to this picture we see, at the source, we have a probe and at the destination, these are the servers providing the content.

Okay.

So in this case, Salesforce is hosting off of two nodes, at least for our location here in the Austin Lab.

So if this is something as rudimentary as ping, this would be on this side. The source would be the server that would be logged in on with the console, and then the endpoint of that is, the destination is, whatever I would be pinging.

Yes.

Okay.

The difference being all the stuff in the middle.

The difference being that this is completely and totally unlike ping in every possible way.

So if we zoom into the front portion of the path... Actually, I want to reverse that. So, if we look at the first set of nodes that we're going through from our source, this is all of our local nodes, right? And then we connect through over to the internet. Let's zoom in to that. We see Time Warner Cable here. They actually have one, two networks. It's interesting because there's Time Warner Cable and Time Warner Telecom—they did some mergers and acquisitions, so we're actually seeing remnants of that in their network design.

And in this case, the circle's a little bit bigger and it's telling me how many elements are inside that group.

Right, there's five nodes in that group. So, if I wanted to look deeper into that, I would click. And I will see those five nodes. Now as we go, we pass through Time Warner Cable's network. We go through TeliaSonera as a backbone provider, and finally to Salesforce. So, all along the way here, this is what has to work for delivery of your application—in this case, Salesforce— to work for your users in the Austin lab. And specifically on Port 80. So unlike doing something like Traceroute or Ping,

Yep.

This is actually simulated HTTP traffic on the correct port, so you're really seeing what this application would be using.

It's HTTP traffic, right, that looks like the application traffic, and the intent there is oftentimes you see Traceroute won't work, or it only finds one or a couple of paths.

Or differentiated routing by application.

Absolutely.

If the firewall is being smart about how it's operating.

Yep. So here, we're matching that and we're showing you the performance that your end-users can expect. So let's actually dig into this a little bit more. We saw Time Warner Cable. Let's dig into Salesforce's network by clicking here.

And I will take a look at this link. Looks like we have an edge router connected to an aggregation router. You may notice I'm getting hop-by-hop performance for each one of these links. So I can see for the traffic that's going across this link, two milliseconds of delay is imposed by this link, right? So it's really helpful to understand where the contributors are to the end-to-end performance. If I select the node, I can start seeing this is owned by Salesforce, this is their prefix, this is the network that is originating that, as well as their contact information. So all of a sudden, I'm getting information that is precise and actionable if I have a problem. For example, I may have a user come up to me and say something is slow and I could say: meanwhile, it works fine for me, all right.

Mm-hm.

So I could look into this tool and I may find there's extra delay on one of these links that's carrying 13% of my traffic. So only some of my traffic is experiencing the delay, and that is connected between two Salesforce nodes, and I have their contact information to try and start going to solve that.

Well, that's really handy there, right? Because I'm paying Salesforce an awful lot for this service. They have a help desk. If I can call them with something that's actionable right off the bat, specifically with where there is a problem related to a node or a link between nodes,

Yes, and so you are more likely to get it resolved, and I want to be able to start, I want a new status for Web Help Desk, which is closed one, right? Which means I completely owned it in under about two minutes. But rather than sitting on the phone and saying, well, you know, some percentage of the time, we seem to be having this problem and it's transient and well, now my users aren't complaining, and I can't really explain why. You can actually say, you can give the numbers that they can work on, this is percentage of route traffic for this link that's affected and what the delays are.

Yep, and what the performance metric is for that bad actor and when that is occurring. So we've seen sort of some of the new level visibility we get over the internet. Let's actually take a look at a problem in our network, which will give us a chance to look at what information we pull in for our network.

Well, and ideally, the problem isn't in your network, but when the problem is in your network, that means that you can fix it. You have, at least, ultimate control, theoretically, over it.

That's right, so let's take a look at that. So say someone comes up to my desk. We're looking at Salesforce. Someone comes up to my desk and they say, hey, I was seeing a problem with Salesforce—it went away, but I would like for that to not happen again.

Wait a minute, you're saying that people will come up to you and talk about a problem that happened around a certain time on Sunday that they remember?

That sometimes happens. Yes, sort of. So, if we look below, we see the end-to-end performance metrics for this path. And this is a combination, or summary, of all of these different paths together, and what the result is for your end-user. So we can see through the day we were doing pretty good. At somewhere around 80, 90, 100 milliseconds, and then here around 3:50 PM, we bumped up. Now the cool thing here, like we've all seen charts in Orion, Orion has plenty of charts.

Yes.

But the cool thing here is if you select your bad intent performance, it will then load for you the network path and its behavior for that time period. This is a game changer for troubleshooting. So here, if we start taking a looking at this path, what do we pay attention to? The thing that's red, of course.

Right?

So, taking a look at these end nodes, we're seeing average of 280 milliseconds, this is an increase over our hundred or so here. And we actually, if you expand this, we'll give you human language to describe what's going on. Crazy idea, right? Latency 322 is over our dynamic threshold that we've set up for you.

And you might have multiple issues, actually.

Yeah, you may have multiple issues. In this case, that slowness is affecting both of our end points, both of the servers provided—

Because the problem is upstream here.

That's right. You're skipping to the solutions—

Right.

So, let's zoom in here. We see NetPath has identified that our connection between R3 and R5 is slow. It looks like we've got 234 milliseconds that is imposed just by that one link so not so great. And we're good troubleshooters here, so we like to compare. Comparisons are definitely powerful for troubleshooting. So if we look at interval right before the problem, you see there was like a 3 milliseconds—

Flash back and forth.

So, looking at that problem area with this 230 milliseconds, once NetPath has identified where the transit impact is occurring, then and only then, will it start pulling information from NPM, NTA, NCN, and so on, to help understand what problems are occurring on those devices that may be causing that transit impact. So, in this case, we got configuration change. But it's important to note that if we have a configuration change on R7 or ICP or anything like that, that won't show up on R7, because NetPath has proven that it's not impacting our traffic. Here, we have transit impact. We have a configuration change that occurred on the device that's causing the transit impact around the time when the transit impact started, right? We'll click on this configuration change, and what should it show us?

Of course, the diff. What changed? What is that configuration change?

And that's in CM integration that's pulling that in.

Absolutely, yeah. So here we can see on interface Ethernet 1/0, we had a traffic shape that was changed.

You took a zero out.

Yeah, that's the problem. So, there's a zero that's been removed, so our traffic has constrained even further. And it's kind of hard to count zeros up to seven. But anyway, that's a problem. It was on Ethernet 1/0, so we'll be good troubleshooters and go verify.

Yes.

And because it's a node that's being pulled, it's under management. It actually knows the interface details, as well.

Yeah, we can map that inbound connection to specifically what interface is connected there. And we're seeing Ethernet 1/0—that was the one where both the change happened and where we had this bad performance.

Right.

So there's two ways, there's a couple ways to resolve this, but basically you can just revert that config either using NCM or SSH, whatever's fastest for you. The other thing that you could consider is looking at these nodes. So, if we look at the parent node, we can see this is R5, we can see this is a Cisco 7206 VXR. We can look at CPU, RAM, start exploring interfaces. I can even click on the interface to get details about that interface. Now that gives us a portal through which we can see in the data that we have from flow, right? If this interface has too much traffic, what is that traffic? That's an alternative solution path there. So, traffic shared route—that was an Egress function, so we'll take a look at our Egress traffic on this interface, and we can see our biggest conversation is this conversation between 96.17.202.42 and this .100. That's only 3% because we have that over-aggressive traffic shaper.

Right, and it's confirming that this is not something where the limitation is that one of the devices is overwhelmed, CPU or memory, or that there's some other competing traffic. Literally that flow shaper, that missed feature that we implied is causing that problem and this wouldn't show up as an error, right? If I'm just polling and I'm looking at this, I'm looking at CPU, everything is fine. Everything's doing great. But the application, people are complaining because some percentage of the time, that traffic is flowing over that link and is doing what is supposed to do, as far as the network is doing, but as far as the application is concerned—

Slow downs.

One in some number of packets is getting a significant slowdown.

Yup. And this is, of course, part of NPM. So if you click on the conversation explanation there, it will bring you to the NetFlow details page for that conversation, so you can see all of the history there, all of that goodness. The other thing is, if we want to click on the interface or the node name, that will, of course, pull us back to no details, interface details so all of this is very much an integrated thing. It’s all of your data expressed through this one path designed to solve problems with that path.

Okay. So do you want to set up one?

Yeah.

Show how to set up a path?

Yeah.

Let me do it. Let me do it.

Okay.

All right. So this one is again, remember, we've talked about the new interface. So I'm going to go under Network and down here to NetPath Services. I know, it's just handily named, right? So, here's the ones that are defined, remember, we're going to set up, it's not on here. We set up Google by default when you install it, so that you'll have one that's up and running. And by default, that'll be running on the main pro that's on your primary poller.

Yes.

But you could put those wherever you want. Creating a service is a piece of cake. So service, again, is the end point that you're going to, so that's going to be Google, Salesforce, your internal applications, whatever it is, and it's going to be a combination of a host name, and a port. Because, again, you might have port-specific routing, would not be at all uncommon.

So interesting note there, Google is now pushing everyone to 443. 443 is encrypted, but this works as well.

Well then, let's be good. Let's see 443. We'll give it an alias. I'll call that, it's just a simple nickname so that's my internal name, it's a very weird name, but whatever you choose internally. So that's just my internal name.

Yep.

And then Probing Interval, again, different that polling because the probe works completely differently.

Right, we can't poll all of this gear, we don't have administrative credentials, but we can probe.

And so that gives you control over how much data you want to store. And then you say next. And then you're going to add that to a probe.

Right.

So again, probes are, if you want to create a new probe, that's a piece of cake you're basically given the IP address the same—

It will deploy that probe for you.

But in this case, we don't care about that, we're just going to assign it to the one on the parcel we already have here. I say create, and that's it.

That's it, man. We just created everything we needed to, to create the path that we saw on that previous screen. Okay, so one last question. How much does this cost?

So this is a feature of NPM. There's no new licensing around this feature. You just get it if you own NPM.

So all you got to do is upgrade to NPM 12 and it's yours.

Yup.

That is pretty amazing. [MUSIC]

That really is a lot in one release. The UI updates alone. It captured a lot of user feedback and suggestions.

Yeah, it seems way fresher to me. And I will admit, I was kind of picking on it a little bit. But I've also seen these updates coming and knew it was going to be great. The other thing is that it's icing on really awesome cake of function.

That's a lot of content. There's no way that's going to be a 25-minute episode.

Can I just say this? Even though the show went a bit long, you all heard, it didn't come close to covering the details of these features. The viewers may not like that.

That's true. It was way too much to put all into one episode and that's where you guys come in. So, obviously we're going to go into depths on how to use each of these new features in coming months and we need your help. As always, SolarWinds Lab is driven by you so, keep your feedback coming and let us know where we should focus on all of this for the next episode.

Next episodes.

Visit lab.solarwinds.com to give feedback, and be sure to register for reminders about upcoming shows and topics.

All right, perfect. I think that's it.

Good. Let's click the logout button. I'm Rob Stovenour.

I'm Chris O'Brien.

And I'm Patrick Hubbard, and thanks again for watching SolarWinds Lab.

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